Some of the best puzzle games are those that require you to develop new ways of thinking. While Braid is probably the most well known example for encouraging players to learn to think not just in the present, but also how to use the past to set up a successful future, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom does a great job with this concept as well. While Winterbottom doesn’t draw on the exact same set of required skills, there is a lot of overlap. This is a good thing; just like Braid was an ejoyable puzzle game, Winterbottom also does well at earning its 800 Point/$10 price.

Winterbottom revolves around what starts as a simple concept: Move from one place to another, snatching pies as you go. This is very easy in the tutorial levels and the first few stages of the main game, but it quickly becomes more complex and requires clever thinking. The titular character is mostly an unimpressive man, with only a few special abilities of note: He can whack things with his umbrella, use that umbrella to float from long jumps, and he can record clones of himself to do things in a location the real one can’t stay in. Not only that, but he can stand atop his clones as improvised ladders, launch them over obstacles (or record them swinging their umbrella so they launch the real Winterbottom instead), and so on. The game adds new concepts at regular intervals, but I wouldn’t want to spoil too many surprises so I’ll leave it at that.

While the focus is on the multiple layers of thinking most stages require in order to complete, the visual and music style of this game deserves special mention. There is a very obvious retro feel to it, paying homages to a mix of children’s storybooks (think Dr. Seuss), early silent films (the majority of the game’s graphics are in black and white, with a ’film grain’ filter to it), and exaggeratedly cartoon gentleman style character designs suggesting something similar to the Industrial Revolution era. Even the music matches these inspirations, and while some of it is done as exaggerated parody, much of it is obviously a loving nod to those sources. These things add some much-needed character and charm to what would otherwise be a pretty drab (but still good) game, and while the theme may eventually lose its hold on you it never becomes outright tiring.

It’s hard to put an exact figure on how long one might play Winterbottom. Most of the game’s stages encourage you to think on multiple layers of cause and effect, as well as understand how to creatively use the concept of clones as a form of quasi-time travel. Because of this, it’s possible you’ll drop into a stage and immediately know what you need to do then solve it within half a minute. On the other hand, you may miss an important link in how to solve the stage (and some of them can be solved in multiple ways) and spend half an hour on just that one puzzle. It does suffice to say that the game has dozens of stages, as well as some built specifically to encourage speedrun/score attack play.

The difficulty level seems to be subjective as well. I found that I was able to figure out roughly a quarter of the puzzles encountered in very short order, another quarter in about five minutes each, another quarter still within about twenty minutes, and admittedly the rest either took upward of an hour or I sought help for completing the stage in question. On the other hand, some people have blazed through each stage almost immediately and declared it too easy and too short, while others I spoke with had major trouble on almost every stage. That isn’t very useful advice on its own, but if it gives you any perspective I am a moderate fan of other puzzle games such as Braid, Lemmings, and The Lost Vikings; Winterbottom requires the same sort of thinking and skills, and offers a relatively similar challenge.

This makes it hard to put an exact hour count on The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, so for those of you who have to make every gaming dollar stretch as far as it can I’m not sure what to say; this may or may not last you a while. But for everyone else, if you enjoy puzzle games that reward deep thinking and planning multiple concepts in sequence then you’ll probably love this one. It’s an enjoyable puzzler with a neat theme and presentation, and definitely earns its 800 Points/$10.